Jean-Guy’s Blog

After half a year of waiting, I finally organized myself an upgrade DVD for Mac OS X Leopard and spent a couple of days backing up old files, installing an new OS, getting all the tools I had together again etc. All in all, it was worth the effort, although there are a few little things that I am not 100% happy about:

• Per default, my primary groups is now ’staff’, and so far I have not found a way to change this. But I will keep searching…
• X11 and Finder cannot always communicate with each other and X11 leaves certain areas of the screen white, in particular when you work with external displays (it seems to work fine as long as you only use 1 display). Installed the recommended (semi-official) update for X11 but this did not help. I also noticed that if a smaller X11 window is completely behind another window, you cannot select the smaller one as long as the bigger window is active - one has to minimize the bigger X window.
• ‘mount’ cannot access the Keychain to get passwords to mount external drives from the command-line. This uses to work under Tiger. Again, something to investigate.

Other than that, I have the impression that a few packages run a bit faster, but this might only be my personal impression…

I had some problems (actually, I still have them…) to configure the firewall on my Mac to allow VPN connections from home, but could not exectue ’sudo /sbin/ipfw …’. Hence, I did some research on the web to find out how I can change/reset the password of my root login and found something that used to the NetInfo Maganger (which usually can be found under Applications, Utilities). So, in my enthousiasm, I started up this tool and hey, found a few other interesting things! Unfortunately, by accident, I renamed the groups entry and OOPS - the system admin privileges of my loign were gone. In fact, ALL groups on the system were gone and I could not re-assign the system admin privileges to my login.

After some research, I found the solution to the problem on http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106156 which tells you how to reset passwords for administrator accounts:

1. Start up your MAC using the Mac OS X Installation CD (holding down the C key at startup).
2. Choose the Reset Password from the Utilities menu
3. Select your Mac OS X hard disk volume
4. Since all groups where gone, I reset the password for root (dangerous, but it worked for me!)
5. Reboot the system

Once I logged back in again, I started the NetInfo Manager, and after I was asked for a system administrator login/password (which I just set), I could rename groups back to what it is supposed to be. Once this was done, I used the System Preferences to reset the system administrator privileges to all other accounts that once had this property. Done…

Lesson learnt: be very carefull what you do with NetInfo Manager, a very powerfull, but also dangerous tool! It will need some more exploration with this tool to get familiar with its full potential…

I recently got myself a new MacBook Pro and am now making the shift from a Windows and Linux World (I used both operating systems concurrently) to Mac OS X. Although it is a Unix-based operating system, things are not quite 100% the same as I was used to before. There are still a few things that I need to learn and (time permitting) over the next few weeks I will post some of the experiences I have made. So please stay tuned…

This Blog is underconstruction… so please be patient! Thanks.